(5 of 10)
U.S. intelligence officials remain blind to this deficiency. Tenet insists that the agency's proper focus remains "the relentless pursuit of the secret." As long as U.S. intelligence continues to peer only in dark corners, we may struggle to discover what terrorists are hatching right in our backyard.
SHARE AND SHARE ALIKE
Here's how the war on terrorism is supposed to work. In January a U.S. soldier prowling through an al-Qaeda compound in Afghanistan came across a document that contained outlines of a possible plot against the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Yemen. The document contained the name of Fawaz Yahya al-Rabeei, a Saudi-born Yemeni who belonged to al-Qaeda, and it was passed to the CIA and FBI. Working with foreign intelligence services, the agencies came up with the names of 16 Rabeei associates and photographs of 13 of them. Then an FBI investigator poring over the list realized that the brother of one of the men was in U.S. custody in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Feb. 11 agents detailed to Camp X-Ray showed the prisoner the photos and persuaded him to talk. The prisoner told them that a terrorist attack--against U.S. installations in Yemen or even the U.S. itself--was planned for the next day.
At 9 that night--after consulting with intelligence officials, White House aides and Office of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge--FBI Director Robert Mueller posted the names of the suspects and their mug shots on the FBI website and issued the government's most specific terror warning since Sept. 11. No attack took place, but two days later a suspected al-Qaeda operative named Sameer Muhammad Ahmed al-Hada blew himself up with a hand grenade in a suburb of Sanaa, while fleeing from police. Al-Hada was connected to trouble: his brother-in-law is wanted by Yemeni police for conspiring in the Sept. 11 hijackings, and another sister is married to Mustafa Abdul Kader al-Ansari, one of the 17 men the FBI believed had plans to attack America.
The Yemen case was a rare, real-time example of resourceful gumshoeing, timely intelligence and open communication among government agencies. The latter in particular went wanting in the days before Sept. 11. Most notable is the story of Khalid al-Midhar. In January 2000 a group of al-Qaeda operatives met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to plot the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Malaysian authorities caught the meeting on a surveillance videotape and turned it over to the CIA. Last summer the agency identified one of the attendees as al-Midhar, a Saudi who intelligence officials thought had entered the U.S. shortly after the meeting in Malaysia and left six months later. The CIA put his name on a watch list and handed it over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service--but by then al-Midhar had slipped back into the U.S. Within the next few days, the CIA briefed the FBI on al-Midhar. FBI officials say they initiated a frantic manhunt for al-Midhar but never found him. On Sept. 11, authorities believe, he flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. Al-Midhar bought his Sept. 11 airline ticket under his own name, but American Airlines officials say no government authorities informed them he was on a terrorism watch list.